A Level results day

Good luck to all those of my readers getting their A Level results today.

And this is also a day when a lot of confused statistics and nonsense fly about. So here are a few potential rejoinders.

Firstly, a lot of the statistics about the number of students accepted onto particular subjects at university come from UCAS. The figures only cover applications made through them and don't include students who've applied to the institution directly, which includes many distance learning, mature and/or part-time students. This is especially true in subjects where the Open University has the largest student numbers in the country, such as Law.

Secondly, there's often a lot of nonsense written about A Levels getting easier. This has been going on since at least when I took my A Levels back in... erm... very many years ago, and probably long before then. A lot of this comes from non-specialist journalists and commentators writing and opining on a subject they don't know the full details of. The reality is that much has changed over the years including teaching methods, technological support, methods of examination and also the competitive environment with ever greater numbers of students applying to university and under ever more pressure to perform well. So direct comparisons of grades across the decades don't mean much; nor can you pull out an old A Level paper (something much easier to do in the internet age) and ask today's pupils to answer it to compare results.

It does not help that normally this is about the slowest news week of the entire year and A Level results are a guaranteed source of news that get perhaps too much attention. If they came out in a busier news week then the coverage would be more limited and likely to be dominated by those who actually understand the education sector. Maybe this year the Clacton by-election (which is polling today in case you haven't noticed) will help draw away some of the less informed.

If you haven't got the grades you were hoping for, don't panic. There are plenty of options out there, whether going through Clearing, taking a break or the Open University amongst others. There are many lawyers and other professionals who have got where they have in spite of A Level disappointment.

(Image created with Microsoft 365 Copilot.)

How accurate is Educating Rita?

By far the best known film about the Open University is Educating Rita from 1983. Written by Willy Russell, based on his stage play of the same name, it stars Michael Caine as lecturer and OU tutor Frank Herbert and Julie Walters as Susan "Rita" White, a hairdresser taking an OU course in Literature:

So how accurate to modern day OU study is it?

In my experience not very. It may have been much closer to reality in 1983 but technology and the methods of OU study have moved on a lot in the decades since.

In Educating Rita the methods of teaching we see are regular in-person one-on-one tutorials, lectures broadcast on television at anti-social hours and a summer school whilst assessment is by final examination. All of these are very different from how I have been taught and assessed. For starters, I have not had any physical meetings with any of my tutors. All our contact has been through either online group tutorial sessions (and these are not always taken by my own assigned tutor), emails or the occasional arranged one-on-one call. Invariably the interaction is very different to that of Rita and Frank and so the whole premise of the film would not work. Also, there are no longer televised lectures. (The one shown here appears to be broadcast late at night when the BBC Programme Index suggests the OU was generally broadcasting in the morning in this period. However looking again on the film's apparent release date * 16 June 1983, we do indeed find very late evening lectures were broadcast on both BBC1 and BBC2.) There are some summer schools and other in-person teaching events but not on my modules. But instead students do get to interact through online tutorials and forums (and unofficial WhatsApp groups) and there are some assignments that require us to respond to each other's work. In contrast to Rita's exam, so far on my modules at least they have all been fully assessed by coursework though I understand this is a relatively recent development for OU Law modules.

Some things that are familiar include the studying with books at home amidst potential distractions all around or the awkward hours for sessions that can interfere with domestic and social life for both students and tutors ("They expect me to teach when the pubs are open!") though nowadays most evening online tutorials seem to be taken by tutors from their homes (and there are fewer restrictions on pub opening hours). Rita is a young working woman who left school without any qualifications and is seeking to advance herself through the OU; through the WhatsApp groups supporting my modules I have encountered a number of real life OU students who fit this description.

But regardless of how it reflects studying today, it's a good film to watch. Oh and it has Michael Caine actually saying the line previously misattributed to him. "Not many people know that."

(* Film release dates can be tricky to look up at a glance, especially for films in the pre internet era. In those days, it was common for a film to be released first in London's West End and then steadily rolled out across the country. The exact rollout might vary a bit for other factors, most obvious school holidays. There's also the complication of dates for premieres that were often not the day immediately before a film was available to the public anywhere. And international releases were staggered as well. Online searches for a British film often bring up anything ranging from the premiere through to a US general release.

The main reason behind all this was the cost of the physical film prints with many reused from one market to the next. However as global communications and marketing grew, whilst technology made piracy easier, the staggered release dates increasingly created problems as demand was whipped up before the official supply was ready. Some of the big blockbuster movies started investing in many more screening prints to allow for global simultaneous releases and the more recent rise of digital projection has removed the print cost problem. However, staggering can still take place for other reasons such as a country's distributors waiting for a film to prove itself in other markets or even just aligning to local peak weeks for greater ticket sales.)